Word: critics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years ago England's waspish Critic Cyril Connolly attempted to figure out how to write a book that would attain the "immortality" of lasting for ten years-nine years longer, say, than the average novel. His own book on the subject, Enemies of Promise, has made the grade: first published in 1938, it has become a familiar, if not a favorite, of many English and U.S. intellectuals. It has now been reissued, and the story it tells is as interesting and topical as ever...
...longer a novelist, but he is everything else-a critic who writes a knowing account of royal mistresses, an avid traveler whose "escapes" abroad produce delightful travelogues, a father who often yearns for solitude. He is also drinking more than he used to, as a result of his failure as a novelist, but he is raising his standard of living as a result of his popular "success." In short, he is a dead duck...
What fatally distorts Critic Connolly's frank and intelligent book is his conception of "the artist." To Connolly, art is a fragile thing, and its maker a highly vulnerable esthete. Gide, Proust, Strachey, Rimbaud and other artists of a particularly tortured and susceptible nature are his inspiration; he draws none from more robust types such as Dickens, Trollope, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Thackeray. His artist is a creature entirely different from the rest of humanity-a fact that makes Connolly regard Mr. Shelleyblake's failure as something horrifying and unusual, as though it were not a common fate...
Socialistic Plumpness. Because they had none of the sickly romanticism fashionable in his day, Courbet's paintings were laughed at. One critic complained that Courbet must be a socialist: his nudes were so plumply inelegant. Another of Courbet's critics may have been the first, but by no means the last, man to look at a picture and remark that his kids could do it better...
...finicky bachelor of 52, Virgil Thomson comes from Missouri, but got to Manhattan by way of Harvard and Paris. Since he repatriated himself and joined the New York Herald Tribune, he has become America's most readable, and perhaps its best, music critic. Concertgoing by night, and composing by day in his dim, Victorian rooms in Manhattan's old Chelsea Hotel, he has also become one of the few U.S.-born composers who can (or cares to) catch the sights, sounds, smells and flavors of the U.S. in his music-one reason that documentary moviemakers like Pare Lorentz...